great classic smt dungeon crawler featuring touhou characters. The game emulates the classic smt style amazingly and has a lot of cool features from future titles. my only issues with the dungeon crawling is the lack of an estoma equivalent added with the fact that a good chunk of the floors are as big as smt1 cathedral which makes dying in dungeons an absolute chore when you have to make your way back to where you were. thankfully the combat is extremly fast and there are certain ways to mitigate these problems.
as for the touhou side i admittedly dont have much experience from the series but it was cool to see the characters i did recognise from the pc98 games

I am starting post game as I speak but words cannot describe how much I love this game for how faithful and beautiful it is to the classic SMT style. Really, it's just so balanced and fun to play that many parts of the game become enjoyable.

ADiA, as I just said, is inspired by the classic SMT style and plays almost plays like it. You have your first person dungeon crawling, "sleepers" which are the demons of the game, weaknesses, fusion, and all that stuff that is the bread and butter of SMT. The fusion part of the game really disappointed me because it's not essential part of the gameplay flow. In fact, you can just carry on through the game with your favorite touhou characters even if you acquired them from the beginning of the game. Really, it's a double-edged sword because the dev understands people wants to use their favs throughout the whole game in that I respect it, but it hurts that integral part of what makes the SMT gameplay loop so strong. Still, it is a nice consideration and I've used this to bring my favs from below/above the halfway point to the post game. Asides from the fusion, no press turn system means that weaknesses are not as bad and you can bounce back easily from damage. What I like about this game in particular is that it presents the many essential tools like Dekaja/Dekunda early game and you can start messing around to build The Team. The most brutal part of the game is losing levels when you die which may sound like an issue but it is fine because xp is synced; it's just a reality check that this can be a difficult game when it wants to be with a real penalty when you die.

On the other hand, the dungeons in this game are small, simple, and nothing too extreme (may eat these words in the post game). You got your slide puzzles, poison tiles, warp mazes, FOEs, etc. Dungeons aren't that bad but that made me wanting more from the main game and, not to sound insane, but a little longer. It's still pretty good dungeons with not too difficult maps like the teleporter maze; they're actually reasonable to deal with.

The story is something I can't comment on much because I haven't caught up with many of the touhou games, but I understand most of the general characters and the plots of mainline game along with some manga. I wish there were more involvement in some areas like the youkai tanuki forest or TORIFUNE, but I have to say the last fight was pretty cool. In general I like how straightforward the plot and dialogue is; touhou has always interested me as world.

The game is balanced I would say, and you have almost entire freedom to go to whatever area you see fit (and capture any sleeper even if it exceeds your level) when reaching below the halfway point. Sure, it has its flaws but I love this so damn much for how close it gets to replicating the classic SMT formula that I want to pick up an emulator and play SMT 1/2/ and IF. It's literally just a classic SMT game but with QoL and it's great. Highly recommend trying it even if you know nothing about touhou.

I don’t really know how much of Artificial Dream in Arcadia’s appeal is carried by the crossover between MegaTen and Touhou, or just the fact that we haven’t seen Megami Tensei 2’s brand of dungeon crawling in a minute, but what I can say is that it’s a lot of fun, with a clear passion for the two series evident throughout the game and a clear effort to make this style of game play well and make sense in 2023. Features of MegaTen that are often considered frustrating (e.g. pitfalls, one way doors, the magnetite system, the luck based feel of negotiation) are made far more manageable thanks to new additions such as grimoires or the battery system, or, of course, the bullet hell hijacking. The complexity of the dungeons feels toned down from those games just a little bit overall, though they are still well designed and a test of survival and endurance, and anyone missing Atlus’ strangely addicting brand of bullshit dungeon design can look forward to the final post-game dungeon. It’s a comparatively welcoming and accessible game, with all of the quality of life improvements you’d expect from a modern Megami Tensei game, while still requiring careful team building and strategy. I was worried about this game pulling an SMT5 and making level-ups too powerful, and thankfully that’s not the case; I found myself building a new party for just about every dungeon, partially just for fun and partially to not get destroyed.

There’s no way of getting around this, but the story is really lame. The plot just feels like an excuse to explore Gensokyo and collect Touhou characters, and while I never expected a great, or even decent plot from this game, I was still disappointed with how it flounders in some areas. The execution of the tower, for example, which seemed like it was meant to be this game’s version of Tarturus, felt so half-assed with its one gimmick repeated throughout the floors. Not to mention how the final boss and ending felt so anticlimactic. At the very least, the plot does allow for some really fun scenarios, such as vandalizing Eientei with Mokou, or invading the moon and leading a rebellion for moon rabbit worker’s rights. The unintrusive nature of the plot also means that the player is easily able to break away from the story and tackle some of the sidequests and minigames. The strengths of Touhou Project’s writing don’t have too much to do with the plot, it’s more so world building and characterization. In that regard, ADiA sees more success, but still isn’t that great. Shoutouts to the postgame though. If you felt let down by the main ending like I did, that part of the game feels like an actually solid conclusion.

It’s not a perfect game, and even at their best, games like this are niche for understandable reasons. If you’re the type to play an RPG for the story more than anything, you should just go for something else. Still, if you’re a fan of Megami Tensei, Touhou Project, or dungeon crawlers, the game is well worth your time. If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise, I’m not sure how good ADiA is as an introduction to Touhou, but this is probably the best way of getting into classic Megami Tensei, in the event that you’re interested in SMT 1 or 2, but are discouraged by the jank. With a story mode of around 25 hours and a full completion time of roughly 40 hours, I find ADiA is the perfect length for this kind of RPG, and it's well worth the miniscule 10 dollar price tag (I agree with others that the game’s price could have easily been doubled). As a longtime fan of Megami Tensei and Touhou Project, and someone who has missed these types of games, I loved every second of Artificial Dream in Arcadia, despite its flaws. While I don’t expect others to get the same appreciation from it, it’s still a great game, serving as an excellent tribute to both franchises and a lovingly crafted dungeon crawler in its own right.

Now that I've actually finished the base game (I'll make headway into the postgame dungeons in a bit) I can actually talk about it in a much more deeper fashion. I've been a little disappointed personally speaking at the shift in direction that Shin Megami Tensei has taken with its third person press turn output for its mainline games. Little means little; I love Shin Megami Tensei V and consider it the second best of the series, but that small itch of wanting another classic, first person dungeon crawler with an emphasis on fusion and mapping. So in theory, ADiA should tick all those boxes, right?

I'd like to say that, but unfortunately. Artificial Dream in Arcadia actually goes beyond and above for what I wanted from a modern yet classic Shin Megami Tensei title. In very basic aspects, like its aesthetics, ADiA is an absolutely beautiful reimagening of Gensokyo and its surrounding terms, transforming a fantastic region to a fantastic but antiquated style. I would like to say that is ADiA's strongest aspect, but then I'd be wrong again, because what I do consider the best part of ADiA is not its beautiful graphics, but its mechanics.

ADiA takes queues from classic Megami Tensei, but more clearly does it take aspects from the modern renditions; most specifically, the way Sumireko is built with stats, skills, and affinities takes clear inspiration from Shin Megami Tensei V's handling, being able to use your Sleepers to inherit their affinities or their skills allows a much deeper variety of skills to be used, making Sumireko a real jack-of-all-trades. Byakuren's respec also allows the player to redo her as much as they want, so party building is never truly restricted to a single build. I personally went full World of STR, getting it to 99 by level 40 then juggling Luck, Agility, and Vitality (I had around 50 in Luck?), while then I had a dedicated healer/buffer, a pure magician, and a phys dealer/debuffer. However, because of its variety in not just Sumireko's building but also how Sleepers can also be constantly built upon and added upon by the sacrifice of other Sleepers, that ADiA is not as merciless with its requisites in fusion, and rather that it allows the player to use ANY units as they wish. I didn't do that; because I like fusion, so constantly changing my team was half the fun, however I do think with a New Game+ that using specific Grimoires and a specific team of your favorite Sleepers would be a fun exercise.

This does not mean that ADiA is a perfect game, despite feeling out of the base game completely satisfied with what it does achieve; there are some gripes I have with it. For one, hijacking's balance feels a little off. Some of them I found pitifully easy and I opted to specifically hijack to avoid fights due to the lack of an Estoma, but others (Izu and Yumemi come to mind primarily) are disgustingly difficult. Paired that with the lack of a clear hitbox makes hijacking somewhat unreliable. Worse off is the steep cost of Fast Hijacking, needing 75 SP to use. I understand the price, but when the discounted price of a base Hijack is 25, I'd rather take my chances than rely on Boosters or constant combat to regain that extra 50 SP. I'm also a little sad that the bracketed skills can't be gained through skill inheritance, because I simply never used one because fusing feels too closed off to be able to transfer these skills to the end, and because I used a physical oriented cast with three out of four Sleepers (including Sumireko) focusing on physical damage, that regaining SP was a hurdle due to the unreliableness of obtaining a crit. My fault? Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that I found SP to be unreliable despite the Special commands being debatably useful. I never used Pierce, for example, despite Pierce being an absolutely crucial skill in other Megami Tensei games and especially for physical builds. Part of it would also be that having elemental damage that scales off of Strength would have gone a long way in relying on SP and bracketed skills.

I'm also partially disappointed in a few concepts in the storytelling that didn't feel entirely done. Touhou 12 and 13 being just a small sidequest to unlock respeccing felt wasted, for example; I don't mind 13 not having much because it's not really a game that has the setup necessary for a pure dungeon crawl, but merging both of the games felt like writing a quick check to make sure no touhou game goes underrepresented. 7 also fell to this; the only part of it was the Prismriver mansion, which also falls under the same thing as 13 where it's the best that could have been done, but it's still a little sad not to see Youmu and Yuyuko properly have a role in the story. I'd extend this to 19, but it DID come out a month ago, so it would be unfair to have it as a gripe.

The TORIFUNE dungeon is another part that felt disappointing in a storytelling sense as it felt it had no real bearing on Gensokyo or its cast as the previous dungeons do. DO NOT take this as me not enjoying it because the Hifuu club stuff is my favorite thing that Touhou has made, but there's no real characters or dialogue or enemies that really fit TORIFUNE, especially since Trojan Green Asteroid makes a point that TORIFUNE is a lush enviorment filled with fairies. You could maybe say that the TORIFUNE in Gensokyo is the idea of what it is in the Outside World given shape, but... well, I like Renko and Merry, so not seeing them or being able to use them was a little sad.

I do make a point on how TORIFUNE is represented because outside of that, I actually think this is a pretty well written game? I have some gripes with how some characters are represented, it's not perfect with how I see them, but there's a genuine hilarity to the stark contrast that is Gensokyo against Sumireko's contemporary outlook. It might not be something that ages well, but to be fair, Sumireko isn't someone who would age well as a character. And that's fine; for now, the time period we are in, she's a very fun lead with that twinge of cringe you'd expect from a high school zoomer, and the dialogue options that go full with that are really fun. I did also really like the ending, which I won't get into because the dev said not to spoil, but all that's really needed to be said is that it's a very nice ending to who Sumireko is as a character and how that works with the ending character as well as just Gensokyo, which was the strongest part of Artificial Dream in Arcadia and just the process of exploring Gensokyo and the cast at large.

The only thing to really conclude with is that it's kind of a crime this costs 10 dollars. Having finished it at 25 hours, the amount of mechanical depth and unit variety with exceedingly great dungeon design is something that really deserves to cost, like, 20 dollars? I'd pay for that. It's what I wanted from a modern Shin Megami Tensei, delivering in even more spades than what I had originally wished for. I'm still gonna hound Atlus to stop making Persona 6, though.

Really fascinating game, and a really high quality sendup of SNES Shin Megami Tensei with a Touhou flavour. I was absolutely enraptured with the first 3/4 of this game, because of how high quality and authentic the experience is to both franchises. However I do have some criticisms that compounded themselves especially in the last quarter of the game.

Principally I think the game goes on for way too long, clocking in at around 22 hours completing the base game, the whole last quarter felt like padding just because there was a desire to see every part of Touhou as a franchise represented in this game, but the connective tissue for the last few hours before the final climb up to the top of the last dungeon was tenuous at best, with no story in the actual dungeons themselves either. I understand that it would feel off if we didn't get cool locations from the deep corners of the lore represented, but given the encounter rate with no way to adjust it, and the fact that the story felt pretty much done before you're hit with this final roadblock I was growing pretty resentful, especially because of some more annoying mechanics in this last set of dungeons. I was also pretty disappointed with dungeons that used Etrian Odyssey like overworld encounters since the encounters themselves provided little reward for overcoming them, and the actual encounters were easy to overcome as well, making them kinda moot as a dungeon obstacle. I'm also not enamoured with giving rewards for completing maps when dungeons often employed one way tracks and teleport mazes, making map reward completion an absolute slog for like 2500 Yen often.

The combat is really good, being very similar to SNES SMT without Zio stun cheese, and the Sleepers manage to capture the wonderful feeling of finding new demons and progressing as you go along, although I do think that the options of being able to upgrade and level your old sleepers to bring them along for later content is a bit of a scam, the EXP curve required to bring them up to par with the tier of sleepers even 2 dungeons later is pretty steep and requires you to grind sacrifice fodder, which is a shame because I did bring a Marisa out of stubbornness to the endgame and she still felt like she was pulling far less weight than my two new frontliners I was just able to fuse.

While I don't think this game is as well put together as a Shin Megami Tensei game, it's still a fantastic game on it's own merits, let alone as a Megaten or a Touhou fangame and well worth playing for any enthusiast.